What's love got to do with it? #lovelearning

The lecture my colleague Phil Selbie presented this week to my final year primary education students was quite unusual in a number of ways. To start off, he played Tina Turner's pop anthem, got everyone clapping along, and he even performed a bit of a dance too. His message was clear - what you are about to listen to is not an ordinary lecture. In fact Phil's lecture was about an unusual subject - at least, unusual in that we don't often hear about it in education - love. His theme was love of learning, love of education, and especially love for each other. He argued that the success of teaching and learning is dependent upon good teacher student relationships, and that love was paramount. Phil (his name, appropriately, is loosely derived from the Greek word Phileos, meaning brotherly love) made the remark that love is a word that is easily confused in our western culture, because in English at least, we only use the one word for what turns out to be a large spectrum of different kinds of emotion and attachment - a complex array of loves, from mild affection, through passion to absolute adoration.

Here's the problem: Teachers can get away with saying they love their subject. They can even say they love teaching at their school. But if a teacher to say they 'love' their students, what they mean might easily be misconstrued when in fact what they probably wish to express is that they are dedicated to their students and are fully committed to helping them achieve their potential. Teaching is seen as one of the 'caring professions' for good reason. The problem is that 'love' is a word that is too often misrepresented because it has many meanings, Phil argued, but teachers need to care deeply about their students if they are to help them to achieve their full potential. The Ancient Greeks, he showed, had many words for love (some accounts suggest about 30), each descriptive of different aspects of what it means to love, to care. This huge repertoire of words highlights the importance the Greeks bestowed on love. Love seems to have been eroded and undervalued in our technology driven and fragmented society - hence the lack of vocabulary to express it in all its forms.

The highest kind of love, said Phil, is Agape - unconditional love, devotion to others, possibly to the point of self sacrifice. Many teachers exhibit this kind of selfless love, he argued, staying behind after school, running after school study groups, sports training, exam revision groups, going the extra mile. This kind of selfless dedication to children's education largely goes unrewarded, but the school often relies on this kind of goodwill from its staff. For teachers who practice Agape love, the best kind of reward is to see students achieve and succeed where they would otherwise have failed. It is this kind of love for humanity that attracts people to the teaching profession, because they get the chance to make a real difference in young people's lives. As we all know, while doctors save lives, teachers make lives. Just the identification of being human together and feeling a connection to other thinking, feeling human beings - this is Agape love, and it should be central to the ethos of being an effective educator.

I intend to explore more of the ancient words for love and their implications for education in future posts.

Photo by Hu Totya on Wikimedia Commons


What's love got to do with it? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.